


What is All This Sweet Work Worth?

by tweedisgood



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: First Kiss, First Time, M/M, Male Slash, POV First Person, POV Sherlock Holmes, Second Chances, Victorian Sherlock Holmes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-04
Updated: 2013-10-04
Packaged: 2017-12-28 10:25:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/990934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tweedisgood/pseuds/tweedisgood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A kiss forgiven</p><p> </p><p>Russian Translation: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6923947/</p>
            </blockquote>





	What is All This Sweet Work Worth?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Red_Chapel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Red_Chapel/gifts).



> "What is all this sweet work worth, if thou kiss not me?" - Percy Bysshe Shelley.
> 
>  
> 
> Beta thanks to [mistyzeo](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mistyzeo/pseuds/mistyzeo). A gift for red_chapel with thanks for her generous contribution to the help_syria appeal on lj

“How often those most in need of forgiveness are slowest to grant it to others,” I said to my companion as we left White Rose Hall for the last time.

Watson turned to watch a solitary magpie swoop down onto the lawn. One for Sorrow, as the saying goes.

“Such a small thing still to rankle – a careless word, twenty years ago,” he agreed. “It must have eaten away at his heart: turned it rotten. Coldness and cruel words slowly killed her sincere love for him; all because he imagined she would still rather have married a man she had, in fact, quite forgotten.”

“And the ‘poison’ she was supposed to have fed him turns out to be under-cooked pork chops served in summer. Not a case for your publisher.”

“Give me forgiveness and the assumption of good faith every time,” declared the good doctor, for whom both were as natural as drawing breath. “With those, I’d say pretty much all can be mended.”

He had forgotten. Forgotten that long-ago night of forgiveness and the assumption of good faith which had mended nothing. For there is a third ingredient, as vital to friendship as to marriage: honesty.

 

****************************************

It had been, on the surface, an easy thing to forgive. Watson was heroically drunk when he rolled up the stairs after a dinner at his club and some private indulgence after, only to trip un-heroically over a stray bootlace and lie sprawled like a swimming frog on the landing. As I braced my shoulder under his arm to get him to his feet, he tried to co-operate but only succeeded in pulling me down until we were face to face in a tangle of limbs. He plucked at my sleeve, patting my arm and blinking with the idiot smile of the utterly decimated. He whispered that I was a good fellow, a dear fellow, the best of companions. It was all rather amusing.

Until, in a moment, a mere handful of seconds, it was not.

Good brandy spiced his breath as he leaned in. Intent pierced him, sharpened his bleary eyes and gave me unconscious warning of a disaster I would not be able to prevent, just before he slid his hand around the back of my neck and planted his lips quite deliberately, and quite firmly, on mine, As he broke away he sighed: such a sigh as a man might make around the first cigarette of the day, or after the last note of a sublime harmony.

“Been wantin’…do that…suchalongtime.”

I ought to have struck him. Demanded what in heaven's name he thought he was about; left our rooms in a cloud of outrage; asked him to find other digs; done almost anything save what I did in fact do. Even one or two of those things that in the warped landscape of a drug-tinged dream I had occasionally imagined doing.

Instead, I laughed. A trifle unsteadily, if the truth be told, but I brushed it off as I had done every other token of affection beyond his steadfast loyalty – and even that, too often paid no more due than mute acceptance. I laughed, helped him up to bed and left the pot where he could find it in the night, if he woke still befuddled and clumsy.

Next morning, I observed in silence every wince and shudder as he laboured under the yoke of self-punishment - forcing himself for the sake of manners to sit before the dish of ham and eggs which our good landlady had sent up, and to offer to pour the tea. After an internal struggle two parts nausea and three parts shame, he opened his mouth to beg my pardon and, like St Peter, I denied a second time that I knew him.

“Tsk. We’ll not speak of it, my boy. You have put up with much worse from me over the years.”

Worse, but nothing in sixteen years remotely similar.

So I forgave him, and he _was_ grateful. But so, too, in the days after, there were glances and tones of voice, shards of broken conversation, that were more like... resentment.

It is a matter of basic chemistry. Put in the same test tube two incompatible elements and, shake them as vigorously as you will, they dance around each other for a while but will inevitably separate. Introduce a base to an acid, opposites in every respect save the need in every molecule of each for the other, and a compound is formed that, for good or ill, is a new creation.

We could not go back, and I chose to ignore it, to erase that moment of reaction. As if the residue of it did not linger on my lips and the applications of the discovery unfold irresistibly in my mind. Fortune provided me with a small downturn in cases, as if it had some comment to make on my fault. As I tinkered with experiments - provoking reactions, observing, noting, docketing – I lived that kiss a dozen times a day, jerking frames from a kinetograph, tinted with colour and sound, smell and taste. The thorn-snagging burden of excellent recall: I blessed and cursed it in the same breath.

Drop by drop, our easy companionship started to sour, curdled by cowardice. We became snappish with each other, picking over small slights. Watson spent more and more evenings at his club, at least until business resumed its usual pace. For he still followed me into danger, of course, ears pricked at the least whisper of adventure, my ready, helping right hand (God, I could not think of _that_ , must pack the damned and delicious image back into its locked box). But his writing about those cases took on a tinge of bitterness. He admired me only for my brilliance. I made use of him as I might have a reflecting mirror (I did, but I had before: only now, it rankled). I had ceased to deserve being called best, and certainly not wisest. 

If things had gone on in the same vein for much longer, I should have been left with nothing. Nothing except my hunger, watching like a hawk from the grey branches of a dead tree.

I have been hungry all my adult life. For the most part I have rubbed along well enough. There were other things to want, to consume – knowledge, above all. The body learns to obey, learns that its mutinies will not be tolerated. 

Doubtless you suppose that a man of my profession, my position, must bow before the weight of the law, of morality, of social opinion. They would crush into powder such desires as mine – to know the bodies of other men; to engage their affections, their passions. 

Pish. In that particular respect, the law and society can go and hang themselves and morality is simply another name for taste. What matters to me is _my_ opinion.

And that of John Watson.

He had often written as if I had killed the tree of my heart myself: starved its roots, never allowed feeling to feed them, never let its fruit ripen. 

All true.

Whether he understood my reasons, and what might have happened if I had not, I had always doubted. I doubted it even after he kissed me. I doubted and so I did nothing. Only certainty would have been solid ground.

I know. How ridiculous it appears with the advantage of hindsight. A man – an honest man, and drink makes few men liars even when it makes most of them fools - does not kiss his male friend on the lips unless he suspects it might be welcome. Not in England. Not the way Watson kissed me.

Cases multiplied once more. Life went on as it had before, as it so often inconsiderately insists on doing. Time shrugged off the moment on the landing and wore down Watson's disappointment with me: he forgave me and assumed good faith. Baker Street continued in its grey present; the lawns of White Rose Hall lay green and waiting in our future.

****************************************

For it was then, as the tall gates closed behind us, trapping Sir Miles Strang and his wife in the prison of their lost time, that I determined to lose no more of ours.

“Assumption is the refuge of those who prefer to dodge uncomfortable truths, who would rather be safe _and_ sorry than take a magnificent risk. Of a damned fool.”

“I say, Holmes; that was uncalled-for!”

I had his attention, at least. Now for his curiosity.

“I was referring to myself, John.” 

He stopped in his tracks, open-mouthed. I wondered how his mouth would look, formed around my Christian name. Around other parts of me. 

I veered off the broad drive into the dense, flanking shrubbery, pulling him with me. As we stumbled amongst the undergrowth, shafts of sunlight broke through here and there, picking out the gold and silver in his hair. It was unendurable to me that the balance grow another day toward silver before I had shown him my heart.

“What is this? Where are we going?” He hung back; I tugged all the harder. 

“Parts unknown, dear fellow, parts unknown. We are explorers this afternoon.”

“But the case is over, you said so yourself. What are you looking for?”

“Places on the map that we, that I, have glimpsed but never visited. No time like the present.”

He stared at me as though I were mad. If I was, my cure was in front of me. He could put me in a strait-waistcoat and leave me to my padded cell of reason until madness died or I did, or he could heal me entire.

My doctor would see me now.

The thickest part of the tanglewood was quite hidden from public view. No-one came here; every log was mossy and untouched, no leaf had been disturbed by any footfall heavier than a badger's. Ancient rhododendrons formed scarlet-spattered cathedrals of twisted branches, their aisles tall as a man and wide as a hansom cab. I ducked into one of them, braced my back against an upright trunk and lit a cigarette. Watson followed me, shaking his head.

“Can I suppose you are going to make some sort of sense soon?” he asked.

“I should not care to guarantee it. Forgiveness, my dear Watson, forgiveness. It is of that I wish to speak.”

“I'm afraid I don't understand.”

“I forgave you once, but I do not intend to do it again.”

“What? I thought you said _you_ were the one at fault.”

“I was. Three years ago – Baker Street – a night in May, 1896. Yes, the seventh of May, around half past eleven, if I recall correctly, and I always do. You were drunk; you fell down; I picked you up...”

Colour drained from Watson's face. He stammered something about not meaning it, about it being a mistake, how very drunk he must have been to make such a stupid jest at my expense, and more excuses of the same sort. I ignored them. Lies are only interesting insofar as the shape of them frames an outline of the truth. 

“I forgave you for kissing me then. I should warn you that I may never forgive you if you do not kiss me now.”

I caught him again as his knees gave way. 

The half-consumed cigarette, which had spilled from my fingers onto the dry earth, glowed in the shadows for several seconds, dulled to ash and died. We watched it together, oddly transfixed: hoping, perhaps, for a fire we should not have to light on purpose.

There was nothing else to be done, of course. Hearths do not make themselves. For it must be a hearth: a fire, but contained within a grate. A hearth to make a home.

Watson, used to hearth-laying as women's work, hesitated doubly – trebly. Not a woman but a man. Not a home as the world would have it.

And could he make the first move?

In the dappled shadows, I could see his darting gaze jump between my eyes and my mouth as he stared at me, weighing it up, desire against danger, lower lip caught in his teeth. He took long enough about it that I had time to smoke another cigarette – and to note with some satisfaction that his sight fixed, fascinated, on its glowing tip, burning with every draw, and on my pursed lips as they blew smoke away in a cirrus stream. Still, he lingered on the threshold of my invitation. 

I would lose patience altogether if it took the last remaining cigarette in the case. Best take no chances.

“There is no form here, John. No precedent. And I for one have always done precisely as I wished.”

He tasted... ah, poetry is his forte, not mine. He tasted entirely of himself, and thus of all I wanted. That first feint, and then I was under all-out attack. Knotted bark dug into my back, reared-up roots caught at my ankles. He pushed and pulled at me, his mouth clumsy, chasing, consuming, his hands braced at my shoulders to twist me close against his body as he swayed. 

If in my hurry to be able to forgive I had kissed him first, forgiveness was now assured, for he was undoubtedly kissing me now.

Blood was up, and as is the nature of the case, so in due course were certain other things. There was not a soul within shouting range, and a statistically insignificantly small chance that some wanderer would just happen upon our hiding place, catch us _in flagrante_ and call the Police. Yet something in me cautioned: wait. Stop now, before the animal underneath will not allow it. Understand what this is, what it will be. 

Reason, reason _just a moment more, an instant more, he is so ready, I have only to cant my hips for our standing pricks to greet each other, to slide over and against, only a fine sheath of spring clothing between. Yes, divine friction, rising heat, pulses thundering, just a moment more, an instant more, an exquisite pressure just there, and there, knees buckling, yes, nerves sparking, yes, breath gasping, senses leaping, just a moment more, an instant more_

“No!”

He staggered back, breathing hard, a portrait of dismay.

“I'm sorry...I thought...”

_Reason, reason. Control. Take time to catch your own breath. Speak clearly, speak calmly. There are things you need to know. This is an investigation, of sorts._

“Peace, my dear fellow. You were not wrong; I am more than willing. However, I believe 'thought' is in rather short supply, just at present, in this little corner of England.”

There was no sting in it, no reprimand; only the dry, smiling tone with which I had reined in many a flight of his imagination, many a hasty conclusion, and warned myself off the same. He waited: expectant, trusting me.

Watson's trust has sometimes terrified me.

"I have always preferred not to state the obvious. But this case is most singular, is it not?"

He stifled a nervous laugh. "Yes, indeed."

"Well, then. Both of us wish to do a great deal more than kiss. Both of us cannot help but be aware of the severe consequences of discovery. Is this the solution, I wonder? A tryst in a wood, away from prying eyes, then back to London and all shall be as it was before, save a secret only we two know. There is something piquant about it, you must admit."

Nature. It is not in mine to plead. I must be contrary, must come sideways to my end: must force a confession. I am not kind. Not as he is kind.

"No, Holmes. I don’t admit it. It is not enough."

Kind, and brave, and wise in some ways I am not.

“And don’t try to tease me with offers of further stolen interludes on cases, in places where we are strangers, in thickets and on deserted moors, behind outhouses and down dark corridors,” he warned. “I won’t believe you sincere. The last thing you are is a mere hobbyist. You take on a subject, and set to at becoming an expert in it. You study and practice day and night until you are its master. You won’t let it alone, and I require – I demand – that you do not let me alone.” He stuck out his chin, rebellious. Glorious.

“You demand to be… mastered?”

He let out a shuddering breath at the hint I took no trouble to hide, but shook his head with a crooked grin. 

“You managed that feat a long time ago." He sobered, considering it. "Take possession, then. Let us live together as partners in all things – in all ways.”

“I am not a marrying man, Watson.” _And in this, can never be._

“Then you shall remain a bachelor. A confirmed one. And I shall remain a widower who will never find a woman to compare with dear Mary. I will therefore keep you company, to stop you from becoming altogether unsociable and eccentric.”

“You may never manage _that_ feat.”

“Good.”

“This ‘keeping company’: what do you imagine it to consist of?”

He looked out through the branches of the great shrub into the fading light. Time we were on our way home. As he spoke of our imagined future it took shape before us both, beckoning.

“Breakfast and the daily papers. Tobacco and the Index. Tea and visitors. Cabs and conundrums. Dinner and the concert hall. A hunting cat’s tread on the stairs up to my room, and a long, white hand holding a candlestick. All being well, the flame of the candle trembles, just a little, as it stops in front of my door.”

I told you poetry was his forte.

**********************************

Poetry is far harder to translate into prose than one might think. Twice the work when, for one of the hearers at least, it has hitherto been in a foreign language. I have never learned the speech of lovers: never saw the need nor had the opportunity. Once home, we struggled to capture a moment like the one at White Rose Hall and bend it to our purpose. The intent - dare I say the longing - was certainly there. We sat across from one another that evening, on the edge of our seats, positively vibrating with it. I had even - common sense overcoming a delirium in which we damned the world and did not hide - locked the door.

Several times, Watson began to speak but the words trickled away to silence or inanity. I have seldom been asked so many times in a scant hour if I were cold, hungry, or one of a dozen things it was perfectly obvious I was not. His hand fluttered once in the general direction of my knee, which trembled for want of the completed movement but made no move of its own: no decisive thrust which should take me up out of my seat and into the arms of my friend.

It was Watson who stood, after a seeming eternity. He turned aside, strode to the window and drew down the blinds. Next he checked the presence of his medical bag on the side table, beside the top hat containing his stethoscope. He tidied papers on his desk and scribbled a note– all the minutiae of the close of an ordinary evening at Baker Street, when I would sit smoking the last pipe of the day and he would busy himself for the following morning.

He turned off the gas jets one by one, until the familiar sulphur glow of our sitting room dimmed to grey shadows. I had often sat like this, in the dark, watching him navigate the room only from long use, a blind body’s knowledge. Lulled by the familiar, I did not protest when he paused at the door and murmured:

“Good night, then, old fellow,” turned the key smoothly in the lock and walked through.

Habit, like a penny-in-the-slot fairground amusement, prompted: 

“Sleep well, Watson,” without the least actual connection to my brain.

_No! Do not sleep well. Not until afterward. Sleep with me. On me. In me. Sleep draped together in a sheet that barely covers us enough for decency. Sleep excavated by pleasure and exhaustion. Only, do not sleep yet._

But he had gone upstairs.

There are, as I am told is now legendary, seventeen steps from the front hall to the landing. There are sixteen more to the uppermost floor that is his kingdom. Thirty-three – the sum it seemed neither of us knew how to calculate.

I found that, as so often, I had underestimated him. As I got up to trail, defeated, to my own room, something caught my eye. There on his desk, the swelling in its stem taking up the last remnant of light, sat a brass candlestick with a fresh candle and beside it a box of matches. Underneath was a sheet of paper looped with his familiar, casual hand.

“Come to bed. Don’t forget to pay the tobacconist’s bill.”

Prose into poetry, then. Had he not said he wanted this – that nothing should change, and that everything should? I trod softly, cat-like, but the boards creaked obligingly. The theatre of the ordinary. Real life indeed is more inventive than any playwright. As I reached the top stair, the flame of the candle flickered – some stray draught, certainly not my hand, which was steady with purpose – and I snuffed it with barely moistened fingers from a dry mouth.

I knocked, once, and turned the handle. I had never waited for permission before; why start now?

He was in the act of pulling a nightshirt over his head and neither started nor made any sound of surprise. As if this was quite the usual end to our evenings - I, tugging at my collar stud, transfixed by his smooth flanks and cursing the fall of linen; he, taking the candlestick from me and setting it on the nightstand next to his own where they stood together, stiff and bellying, candle stumps blunted, in dripped pools of creamy wax, wicks dark. I swallowed, throat and chest catching like a well-rosined bow ; Watson gathered his lower lip in his teeth, looking at the nightstand, looking at me as he turned down the sheets. His bed is not built for two: we would have to be agile, suppler than the advancing years might allow…inventive. 

And in my own case, far less fully-clothed.

I turned my back to him somewhere in the disrobing, but as the last fastening slipped undone I faced him square on and stripped off my underclothes as he watched, knuckles white in a twist of his nightshirt, the look of a youth taking his first plunge into the open ocean.

We had been undressed in each other’s company before, naturally: at the Turkish baths, in cramped country inns where privacy was as little thought of as electric lighting. This was different. My skin prickled with anticipation – excited, apprehensive - as each piece of clothing came off, until at last I was not simply unclothed, not merely as nature made me, not only bared to his fervent gaze.

I was naked.

I did not wish it was my own initiation - one cannot undo what is done. Besides, one of us ought to know what he is about and, as a rule, I prefer it be myself. It was enough – more than enough, a generous gift of the universe – to have this first time with him: my friend, my soul, my Watson.

We climbed between the sheets and settled side by side, forced to lie twined about each other, folds of starched lawn rustling as we moved to a close embrace. He has grown stocky with the years, but I am still all steel cord on narrow poles; we matched strength for strength, holding tight enough to groan with effort and enjoyment.

He broke off only to dip his head and begin to kiss me: ripe, juicy kisses on the mouth and neck, soft nips on the unshaven jaw as he plundered my hair with a free hand and chuckled at my disarray. Kisses he had given to a hundred women but to no man. He was an eager voyager, learning the differences and the similarities. I rarely see the sun, so I am tender-skinned as a lady beneath my shirt, but when he traced bicep and pectoral muscle with his closed mouth I braced them, showing off for a grunt of approval and a swipe of his tongue along the curves of arm and breast.

There was hesitation, to be sure. I had a dockworker once, early on. I was just out of university - a drought of any but smooth, furtive youths with dry palms and wide eyes. He too had stopped, opening my shirt to find me man, not boy, then with his great, rough, paws stroked and petted the black hair running in a river down my chest and belly to my groin until I arched, sighing, into the touch and at his pleasure as it rumbled in his throat. Watson’s hands were gentleman’s hands, strong, clean and precise, yet his desire was the same, his pleasure in my body the same, the hitch in his even breaths of the new, and the newly enjoyed, the same.

“Holmes…? What would you li-”

I put one finger against his lips. Too much talk, which is to say any at all, takes away from pure sensation. I needed to concentrate, to distil every second of our coming together and store it cellar-deep for the rest of my life. There would be other times, Providence surely owed us that. None like this one. We had journeyed together long enough that I had no fear that we would fail to understand what was wanted quite without words.

Hands would better serve us - hands that could reach down and around to clutch and knead at haunch and backside, stroke cock and balls tight and heavy under a lover’s palm: to creep up under the hem of a nightshirt and lift it ‘til all was exposed to longing eyes. I wanted to see him and be seen, to feel and be felt, to taste and smell and surge and spill - not to _talk_ about it.

Above all, I wanted to kiss him, every inch of him. To make up for all the times we might have kissed since that seventh of May, three years before. To mouth the arch of his foot, the swell of his calf, trace with my tongue the crease of his thigh; to make him wriggle and laugh, sigh and gasp, breathless, wordless at my bidding.

I kissed his mouth a dozen times, his belly a score or more, his prick – I lost count, or never kept it. Calculation fled; the sum of him was my prize, in my mouth as deep as skill could get it. Primed with that first pleasure, he found his confidence, his courage to ask me to take him in at the other end too. 

I have been had before but never quite like this: spatchcocked, stuffed, his stout sprig oiled for ease, my knees drawn up and apart so he could see my face as he drove in, thrust after thrust, seeing me and not seeing, gazing at that distant place we long to go when we join with another, but so seldom reach.

I was his toy, his mount, his altar – played with merrily, ridden to a sweat, worshipped far beyond my deserving – falling soft and slack against the pillows and leaping, hard as ivory, in his hand as I came to crisis, biting the linens between my teeth so that none in the house should hear me.

Afterwards, there were more kisses – sleepy, scattered. Words would come, in time. No doubt far more of them would be his than mine, but that did not trouble me. 

Poetry is, as I have said all along, his forte. Amongst many other things, he will always be forgiven it.

 

END


End file.
